The Fishers of Oaks Bottom — Part Two: The Kingfisher Who Stayed

In July I wrote that Belted Kingfishers may be the wariest birds at Oaks Bottom — that you usually get one glimpse and a rattling complaint as she bolts the moment you raise a camera. That was true then. Normally they leave while you are still a hundred meters out, and all you take home is the sound of one going away.

Yesterday afternoon one let me stay.

I do not think anything changed about me. I think something is changing about her. Birds on a busy urban refuge learn what is dangerous and what is only noisy, and a kingfisher that has spent a season watching people walk the loop without ever once coming at her will eventually decide that people are weather. These are the first photographs I have ever taken of one where she was not already leaving.

The first thing worth saying is that she is a she.

That rust band across her belly, below the blue-grey one, is the female’s marking. The male has the blue band and nothing under it. Belted Kingfishers are one of the very few birds in North America where the female is the more colorful of the pair — nearly everywhere else in the bird world it runs the other way, and the male is the one wearing the paint.

Which makes the background a coincidence worth noticing. The one feature that makes her more ornamented than her mate is the exact color of the autumn behind her. She only matches that canopy because she is female.

What She Is Actually Doing Up There

It looks like contemplation. It is arithmetic.

Light bends when it crosses from water into air. A fish seen from above is never quite where it appears to be — it sits shallower than it looks, and offset from the line your eye draws to it. Every heron, every osprey, every kingfisher that eats has solved that problem. She has to aim at where the fish actually is rather than where she can see it, and she has to finish the calculation before she commits, because once she leaves the branch there is no correcting.

So the stillness is not patience in the way we mean it. She is ranging a target.

This Is My Pond

She circles the pond announcing herself wherever she goes, and the translation is not subtle. Belted Kingfishers hold territory along water and patrol it on a circuit, rattling as they travel. It is a boundary being stated out loud, repeatedly, to anything that might be listening.

Most of us have only heard that call going away from us, because the rattle is usually given in flight. Catching it from a perch, with the bill open, is the part of this frame I did not expect.

And here is something you cannot see at a hundred meters: she is not a small bird. We file kingfishers under small because we only ever meet them at distance, and because the compact shape hides the mass. Up close the head and bill are startling.

• American Robin — about 77 grams
• Blue Jay — about 85 grams
• Belted Kingfisher — 140 to 170 grams

Roughly twice a robin. Eleven to fourteen inches long, with a wingspan close to two feet. The front-heavy look is structural — that bill is a tool for a bird that hits water head first, and the skull and neck are built to take the impact.

The Drop

A kingfisher dives from a standing start. No run-up, no circling, no second pass. She goes from perched to committed in one movement, and these two frames are a fraction of a second apart in the same burst.

Here the wings are thrown open, every primary separated, and the white windows across the flight feathers are fully fanned. This is the pattern you almost never get to see — on a perched bird it is folded away, and in level flight it is a blur.

Then the wings sweep back and down as she accelerates, head already in line with the bill, both sides mirrored. This is the moment she stops being able to change her mind.

And it is about to get stranger. A kingfisher enters the water blind. A third eyelid — a nictitating membrane — slides across the eye on impact to protect it. So the sequence is this: she ranges the fish from the branch, corrects for the water bending the light, commits to a dive she cannot abort, shuts her eyes, and catches a moving animal from memory of where it was the last time she saw it.

That is what all that sitting still is for.

Why This Afternoon Was Different

Nothing here was baited, called in, or approached. I stood where the light was and waited, and she worked the pond around me as if I were a post.

The light did most of the rest. Five o’clock in October puts the sun low and in her face, which fills the eye and holds the white breast without blowing it out. The usual kingfisher photograph is a grey silhouette against bright sky, because the bird was above you and already leaving. This one was below the ridge of the light, side-on, and staying.

I have been walking this loop for years and have never had an afternoon like it with this species. Whether she has decided we are harmless or simply decided this pond is worth more than her caution, I do not know. But it is the second time in a month that Oaks Bottom has handed me something I had assumed I would never get — and that seems worth writing down, in case it keeps happening.